Reality shopping; a consumer's guide to new age hokum

Whole Earth Review, Autumn, 1986 by Alan M. MacRobert

Reality Shopping A Consumer's Guide to New Age Hokum

RECENTLY ON DISPLAY in bookstores throughout America was a flashy paperback entitled Somebody Else Is On the Moon. The cover depicts an astronaut coming upon huge tracks in the lunar soil and pipes sticking out of a crater. "For 200 years astronomers have suspected -- now we know!" proclaims the blurb. "Incredible proof of an alien race on the moon! The evidence: Immense mechanical rigs, some over a mile long. Lights, flares, vehicle tracks, towers, pipes, conduits."

To the connoisseur of crank literature, this book is a delight. It is the rambling narrative of how author George H. Leonard, a retired public health official, has identified amazing things in photographs of the moon that he gets by mail order from NASA. (NASA, of course, is part of a governmental conspiracy to cover up Leonard's findings. The only reason the Apollo astronauts visited the moon was to study its inhabitants, and everything else is a government hoax that "dwarfs Watergate.") The chapters of Leonard's book bear such titles as "A Motor As Big As the Bronx" and "Service Station in a Crater?" Thirty-five pages of moon photos illustrate with circles and arrows the marvels discussed in the text. But the circles and arrows point to nothing unusual at all. The photos are just ordinary moonscapes of hills, plains, and craters.

The most interesting thing about Somebody Else Is On the moon, however, is not its contents. It's the publisher's marketing strategy. The book was placed in bookstores among the offerings for" New Age" readers, including those like myself who like to think that we are in the vanguard, exploring important new ideas and philosophies. There, in fact, is where all sorts of crank literature has migrated. That's where it sells.

In times past, purveyors of fringe and paranormal ideas bitterly charged that they were being censored out of print by conspiracies of publishers and orthodox scientists. No more; all holds are off. Firewalking, sunken continents, astrology, psychokinetic spoon-bending, psychic readings, channelling, aura reading, remote viewing, psychic archaeology, scores of dubious holistic health systems, and a thousand other paranormal ideas have been getting a hearing like never before. And my generation, the supposedly "skeptical" generation, is eating it up.

The very abundance of such claims has made the "Search," as I like to call it, more difficult than ever. This Search is a tradition in my family. My grandfather was a devout Spiritualist. He held seances with the great mediums of the day -- Arthur Ford, Eileen Garrett -- and he took my mother and father to all the main Spiritualist camps. My parents were somewhat more skeptical. My father joined the American Society for Psychical Research and became one of its directors, investigating haunted houses, poltergeists, clairvoyants, and telepaths long before such investigators were guaranteed a spot on the Merv Griffin Show. Up in the attic we still have a set of fake spirit photographs a medium tried to pass off on him; spirit photography was the popular equivalent in those days of psychics' key-bending stunts now.

Some of my earliest reading materials were the "psychic books" that filled my family's bookcases. In one of them, I ran across an engraving of my great-grandfather, Emerson J. MacRobert, a Spiritualist in London, Ontario. At a time when such activities were scandalous and possibly illegal, he had held seances in a top-floor room of an old house with velvet tacked over the windows. Word got out and he was nearly forced from his post on the London School Board by righteous churchgoers. In my childhood reading, I also ran across an old reference to something called a "Treborcam Ethereal Healing Machine." The name is my own spelled backwards.

Descended from two generations of Spiritualists, my father was always noncommittal. He had run across plenty of frauds and exaggerations, but, even at its best, the Society for Psychical Research seemed only able to draw blanks. Under close scrutiny, psychics failed because they were "having a bad day" or because their powers were impeded by the presence of skeptics. Modern parapsychologists excuse the "nonrepeatability" of their experiments with much the same rationale.

This lifetime exposure to the paranormal has left me somewhat disillusioned and impatient with the intellectual credulity of my generation's. Still, I'm ready for the day when UFO creatures land on the White House lawn and are interviewed by Dan Rather, or when one single psychic somewhere can predict the future or reliably levitate paper clips so that anyone can see it's so. In the meantime, here, culled from all the time I've spent in the Search, are some guidelines by which to evaluate the flood of paranormal claims. These guidelines, carefully applied, should help eliminate the claims that are worthless -- at least 98 percent of them -- and will provide grounds for evaluating anything that's left.